GLOWING IDEA

Collar Up aims to reduce road accidents involving stray dogs

- RAHUL DEVULAPALLI

If you are on a two-wheeler, an encounter with a stray dog will rarely end well. The encounter can kill you and the dog. Or, you alone. Or, leave you bedridden for life. The best outcome you can hope for is to escape with injuries. Road injuries. The kind that takes time to heal. And, most such encounters happen at night.

Collar Up, an animal welfare NGO from Hyderabad, has demonstrated that the number of such accidents can be brought down with reflective collars. A few months back, Collar Up started putting reflective collars on stray dogs that live along the highways and busy roads of both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The logic is simple: The dog becomes instantly visible when it is within the reach of the vehicle’s headlight, and the driver becomes alert.

Collar Up’s efforts are showing results. For instance, volunteers from Madanapalle in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor district collared around 80 dogs along the local highway. This significantly reduced the number of accidents in the area. Volunteers said that at least one or two dogs used to die every day in accidents in the area. Now, the number is zero on most days. In the IT corridor of Hyderabad, accidents involving dogs fell after Collar Up’s initiative.